Paper Circuits

After posting about the Paper Car 2014 circuit its about time to reveal the final project. In preparation for the Ottawa mini maker faire I have designed yet another paper car. Hopefully the project will run a little smoother than last year. The new design is much simpler to assemble with less soldering and a…

The Tiny84 paper car controller includes the following two features by default. First there is a motor speed controller which allows you to directly drive two low current motors. Using FET transistors attached to the Tiny84 I can drive two high current outputs. Typically the Tiny84 delivers 20mA of current while the FETs extend this…

Paper Blinky is a simple four LED circuit that allows you to develop Arduino code to turn the LEDs on and off in a variety of patterns. Rather than wiring the LEDs on a proto-board they are assembled on a permanent paper circuit; this allows you to rapidly plug in the circuit to demonstrate your…

Our local Arduino Ottawa group created a design contest which required an Arduino design that uses a mystery component. The last day of the contest is June 10th so I had to get my project started quickly. To that end, I re-used as much of my paper car work as I could. This allowed me…

I have simplified the electronics for the paper car. My new design takes advantage of the WS2812B RGB LED which is easier to assemble because it reduces the component count from four down to one part. I also realized that while assembling the circuitry directly in copper foil is fun; it takes greater than an…

I am re-visiting the paper car design in an attempt to make it more user friendly. Specifically I want to be able to guarantee that I can successfully complete a workshop with children as young as 10. While the initial car design was great as a one on one project it is difficult to build…

After the Maker Faire in September I set out to simplify my paper car design. Well simple is relative. I re-designed elements of the car to provide an easier to assemble, more robust design. The simplifications are designed to make it easier to use the car. I did this by pre-building as much of the…

I needed an easy to build circuit board that was kid friendly so I designed a simple paper circuit. The design consists of laser cut paper templates that are wired up using copper foil tape. I decided to start off with a few basic electronic elements including batteries, resistors, LEDs and switches. I could have…

Building on the car project I have taken the pager motor and its paper supports and turned it into a linear actuator. So what is a linear actuator? Motors provide rotary motion that may not be useful in certain application. The ability to convert rotary motion into linear motion can be quite handy so I…

As part of the Ottawa mini-Maker Faire I decided to present a workshop on building paper cars. The project was complex and my initial days presentation was quite honestly a bit of a disaster and we had fun. I learned a great deal from the participants and I hope to do better at next years…